


How the Heart Burns

by Ani



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Dark, M/M, dark!john
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-30
Updated: 2012-04-30
Packaged: 2017-11-04 15:37:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/395434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ani/pseuds/Ani
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"War is the unfolding of miscalculations."</p>
            </blockquote>





	How the Heart Burns

            It wasn't the first, or the fifth, or the tenth death. It was when John was slowly, carefully breaking fingers that he knew he'd crossed a line he never should have been at.

 

 

 

When Sherlock dies John goes to the funeral. He withdraws. He moves out of 221b, and Mycroft quietly pays Mrs. Hudson to keep the flat as it was. John tells Harry and Mrs. Hudson that he has to leave London for a while. That he’s going up north. He buys tickets. He packs his things. He promises to stay in touch but he’s not going to, really.

            He takes a train, for hours, pays for a room just one night, is picked up that night by a plain, unnoticeable car. It’s a short ride to the plane, and the plane is a short trip to Munich, but he sleeps it away, because it’s night. Mycroft is the only other passenger and he remains silent until the end, when he hands John a repacked bag and a fake passport. There are more in the bag. Cash, and the number of a Swiss bank account, for any of their needs. There’s no check-in for Mycroft’s plane, so John is driven into the city, and from there he takes several rides until he has disappeared into anonymity and he can appear at a clean, cheap hotel. When he finds the room he knocks three times, once, four.

            Sherlock opens the door.

            “Are you ready?” Sherlock asks, and he means, for what they are about to do, but John says yes and grabs his hips and kisses him, because he needs to be with Sherlock again before it begins. Because even pretending that Sherlock was dead was unbearable. Because easily Sherlock could die, within the next few weeks.

            Because of what they are about to do.

 

 

 

            Sherlock doesn’t know what he’s doing.

            He knows how to take down a criminal organization. He’s never done so before, but the lack of experience doesn’t stall him. He tracks down evidence. Finds the guilty. With Moriarty dead there are still loose webs to clean up. They have no time for much of the organization, but there are people, who were high up, that they can turn neatly over to authorities whom either mutely accept their data or don’t ask for it at all. And then there is the highest level and the only thing that can be done with them are to stop them from hurting people, permanently, with full guarantee, with the safety of the grave.

            That’s what Sherlock can’t do. He could describe a hundred thousand ways to kill a person, sure, in any scenario of poison or tool or circumstance. He can draw inference from the evidence they gather and know where to point the weapon. But the weapon he points is John. Because Sherlock knows what motions to perform, but he’s not good at actually _doing_ it. Not the way John is.

            At first they have to apply fear. Dark hunters, spraying blood. They take out the very worst first, a right-hand man, hiding in Munich. John shoots him. Easy. The group scatters, and for many that’s enough, but not all, and that makes it harder for them to track down their culprits. To turn them in properly rather than just take justice into their own hands. Each step they take is harder. Each trail is colder. They are cold, often. Too hot. Hungry. Sherlock grows gaunt. John is scarred anew.

            The third person they find, the fifth murderer they’ve stopped, John has to strangle. Sherlock had shot at him but only hit the leg. He leaves for the strangulation. John does not blame him. It is much harder this way, up close. Sherlock does watch their next kill, forces himself to, the time they’re escaping from a warehouse and John only has a hammer. Sherlock’s knuckles are white. John knows he is watching because he feels he is morally obligated to. John doesn’t feel much about it at all.

            There were two days they were caught and trapped in a train car and have nothing to drink. When a man comes in to check on them John trips him, and buries his knee into the man’s throat, to cut off his shout for help. John’s hands and legs still tied, Sherlock managed to get his arms free using this scrap of metal hanging bent off the wall, and the metal can’t be removed as a weapon so instead John, once untied, bashes the man’s skull into it, but it doesn’t quite kill him, and he’s still fighting, and John knows he is going to collapse soon, and he is hot, and he is so angry and so tired and so thirsty, and thought they were going to die that time, truly, and so he drowns the man in his own blood.

            It’s after that, which is the fourth month but perhaps the fifth, that Sherlock learns to just ask. _I need you to get this information. I need you to stop that person. If we can’t turn this assassin in, remove him. If this chemist is too much trouble just protect yourself._ Sherlock doesn’t ask follow-up questions. John gets the work done. Sherlock follows leads and John ties up loose ends; they work together.

            Their list is almost done by the tenth month. There are a few they think have escaped entirely; a few they cannot let do so. Just a few more. Just a dozen, or so, that _needed_ to be killed, and a few… a few more that were, out of self-defense or…. Just a few. Most were shot. It is the easiest, cleanest way. It is what John prefers. Other times he must create his own ingenious methods. Some were simple. Some were frantically close to their own death. John forgets what country they are in. Sherlock runs out of languages he understands. When they are not directly on the chase they sleep, a lot, all day and all night, and other times Sherlock cannot sleep no matter what he does and sometimes, after several empty nights, Sherlock will run the shower so he can cry bitterly in private.

            At one point John had returned to their room, in the abandoned house they were staying in, and washed in the bucket, but it was difficult and so he didn’t quite get everything, and he’d had a busy morning, out for Sherlock, and after he’d cleaned he’d laid down next to Sherlock, and buried his face into Sherlock’s neck, and then his teeth, and Sherlock was helping John out of shirt when he found the blood on his arm that John hadn’t washed off.

            And blood didn’t bother Sherlock, never had. But he had stared at it and then at John’s face and then fled the room.

            And that was the last time Sherlock had let John touch him.

            It only takes a year. And some. Some time more than a year; John’s not adjusted back to a calendar and the difference between days until they return. In triumph. Mission successful. World saved. They reveal themselves to London. Move back to 221b. Offer explanations and hug people and apologize. Mycroft sincerely thanks them. They’ve done the right thing. He repeats that, several times.

            John falls back into a rhythm of normal. He makes tea. He wears wool jumpers and showers every other day and watches telly. He waits until he feels normal again. He doesn’t. But he also feels calm and fine and adjusted, as if there is nothing quite wrong, and one switch hadn’t been flipped back on but it was evidently unnecessary anyway.

            Sherlock spends hours staring at him. He sleeps in his own bed. He screams with nightmares.

            John doesn’t.

            This makes very little sense to John, because that’s why he’d done it in the first place, to protect Sherlock. So Sherlock wouldn’t have to. So John, who was already damaged, would have to hold these memories. But it is Sherlock who looks tormented. It makes John angry, which is irrational, but if John did this _for_ him, if he made these _sacrifices_ , Sherlock could at least appreciate it, and not startle at John or hide in the walls like a ghost.

            They fight. They fight a lot.

            Sherlock says, low, dangerous, “There is something _wrong_ with you.”

            And John says, “You are the one who broke me.”

            There is nothing much to say after that. Sherlock starts insulting his intelligence. John tells him to go fuck himself. One day he comes home and Sherlock is packing his things. Fine, John will move out first; he has less to take with him. This time, when they both leave, Mycroft does not preserve the place. Mrs. Hudson offers it to new tenants. She has not spoken to them in a few months anyway.

            John finds a place where he can stare at the ceiling fan spinning in the dark. He sees, occasionally, in the news, that Sherlock is still solving crimes. He is alone, but he is back to work. Doing just fine. Recovered. Which is as it should be, it is the goal that John wanted to achieve, keeping Sherlock in the dark so that he could stay in the light. John has won. In his way.

            No. They have lost.

            John has lost everything.

            Sometimes when he wakes up he can tastes blood. He assumes he bites his tongue when he’s asleep but he’s never sure.

            One day, an old soldier knocks on his door, a sniper, who says he understands John, understands his loss, understands his choices, the necessity of it, the dark cold ability of it. He offers to help.

**Author's Note:**

> The summary quote is from the historian Barbara Tuchman.


End file.
